Giller winner wrote out of desire to dig deeper

CBC journalist and Giller-winning author Linden MacIntyre says he turned to fiction to tell a story of abuse inside the Catholic church because he found he could delve deeper into the story.

"The story has been covered as much as you can cover a controversial story of that nature in journalism," MacIntyre told CBC News, the morning after winning the $50,000 Giller Prize for his novel, The Bishop's Man.

"I really had to go to an area our business doesn't let you go to, to the area of speculation, the area of making things up. But always at the forefront of my mind is telling the truth as best I could on a very sensitive topic," MacIntyre said.

The Bishop's Man is narrated by Father Duncan, who has been his bishop's dutiful enforcer and played a role in suppressing evidence of sexual abuse within the church. He is forced into painful self-knowledge as a scandal unfolds.

MacIntyre said the story of rot inside an institution could apply as fully to a bank or a political party as to the church.

"It's about priests who betray the most profound kind of trust by the most vulnerable people, and their bosses who failed to lead those institutions into a better place and decided that the default response was going to be coverup," he said.

"This is a story that gets repeated daily in every institution that we can name and it's a story that I wanted to tell, not to single out the Catholic church, or single out the clergy, but to single out leaders and people in positions of trust and say, you know what , we've got to do a better job."

MacIntyre said his greatest task was getting inside the head of the man who would be his narrator.

"I'm most proud of having found the voice of this particular priest. I owe that to some of my friends who have been and still are priests," he said.

The Giller jury — Britain's Victoria Glendinning, Canadian writer Alistair McLeod and American writer Russell Banks — praised the sensitivity with which he handled the subject of abuse, with the dirty secrets left in the wings while MacIntyre wrote movingly of a crisis of faith.

"If I have in my own closet a big ethical question, a big ethical and moral failure, how do I do that job and look at myself in the mirror, when I'm approaching middle age — this is the theme of the book and it's a struggle that we all deal with no matter what line of work we're in," he said. "Once I found that space in my head, the storytelling became pretty simple."

Recent events, including a huge settlement in August with abuse victims and the arrest of Bishop Raymond Lahey on child porn charges, have made the book very topical.

But MacIntyre says those events were a complete surprise to him, as they emerged long after he had finished writing.

In his acceptance speech at the Giller Awards in Toronto Tuesday evening, MacIntyre paid tribute to the people of Antigonish and to priests and nuns who continue to struggle on in the church.

MacIntyre, who grew up in Cape Breton in a Catholic family, said he is now agnostic. But he said he respects those who keep their faith.

"The last thing I wanted to do is cause people to be less faithful — I don't want to take that gift away from them — but I do want them to question the institution that gives them this faith, to challenge the leadership of these institutions," MacIntyre said.

"Let's stop treating bishops and priests as some kind of royalty. Let's see them as public servants, which is what they really are and let's ask them for accountability."

He also paid tribute to the other writers nominated: Anne Michaels, Colin McAdam, Annabel Lyon and Kim Echlin.

"I can't really believe this is happening to me because at this point in my career, I'm a journalist and a broadcaster. Dreams of writing the great novel are so far behind me, but here I am in a crowd of people who are great novelists around me and they hand me the prize," he said.

MacIntyre is co-host of The Fifth Estate, the current affairs show, and worked previously with The Journal and with CBC Halifax.